We All Fall Down
by Someryn
Summary: The end comes for everyone but Elena and Klaus, leaving two part-time enemies to wander a fallow, haunted planet together. When the dead begin to leak back through the portal to the living, Elena must discover her purpose as a newborn vampire while managing her own conflicting feelings for Niklaus Mikaelson. Elena/Klaus
_The end comes for everyone but Elena and Klaus, leaving two part-time enemies to wander a fallow, haunted planet together. When the dead begin to leak back through the portal to the living, Elena must discover her purpose as a newborn vampire while managing her own conflicting feelings for Niklaus Mikaelson._

 _Written as a result of my endless love for post-apocalyptic fiction. Also, because Elena/Klaus makes me happy._

 _A sad story, but (like pretty much all my stories) ends on a hopeful note. Takes place sometime around mid-Season 4. Elena POV. Light on the romance, heavy on the self-reflection._

 _Note: If you're curious, Mystic Falls is canonically located in southwestern Virginia. To be consistent with all the traveling in involved in this story, I positioned it near Blacksburg._

* * *

Virginia is beautiful, and Elena never noticed it before. She was born and raised in Mystic Falls, but she never stopped to actually see the towering hemlocks, the fast-flowing waterfalls that cascade over the rocks in her hometown, the wildflowers that cover all the open fields from April to October.

Something is different in the air now; she can feel it in her lungs, in the faint itching of _not right_ as she inhales - a tiny change in the atmosphere that might eventually kill a human.

The flowers are all dead; the little brown nubs dotting flowerbeds crumble to dust as they drive through empty neighborhoods. The sun's color is off, too, with too much cyan like a bad photo filter that only supernatural eyes would notice.

She wonders how long it will take for Mother Nature to reverse the damage Her supernatural bastard children have caused, if there will ever be a place on earth that can sustain natural life again.

* * *

The end comes suddenly, after weeks of Bonnie trying new spells, coaxing the afterlife to reveal itself to her, twisting her gift into doing something it was never meant to do. The pressure mounts, until even Elena, who as a vampire is as far as it is possible to be from the realm of magic, can feel the prickling tension in the air.

And then, like a giant rubber band that has been pulled back too far, the magic _snaps_ , and she knows Bonnie has finally succeeded.

For the first few seconds they don't realize how badly things have gone wrong, because none of them know what a gateway to the underworld is _supposed_ to look like.

But this isn't the afterlife. At least, not the one they were looking for.

Bonnie's smile is delighted, triumphant as the air flickers and forms a dark doorway in front of where they stand in the woods. As if by unspoken arrangement, Elena has moved to stand with her friends in a rough semi-circle around Bonnie, and awe is reflected on all their faces.

Then a form that is so dark that it _hurts_ to look seeps out of the doorway like smoke from a fast-moving fire, tendrils spreading toward them.

She stares like a zombie as Bonnie's elated expression turns to one of horror, watches Matt rush forward to touch their friend in concern and then drop to his knees like his legs don't work anymore, hitting the dirt face-down.

A blond blur rushes from behind the grove of trees to her left, grabbing Elena around the waist and carrying her away.

Because of course _he_ is here, of course he would want to keep tabs on their movements.

"No, no, _no_!" Elena screams, her fists hitting Klaus's back, but the sound is swallowed by Caroline's sudden wail as the darkness spreads toward her. Her friend turns to run, but the darkness suddenly has wings, too, and it envelops Caroline. She falls to the ground, her arms and legs spread wide, clutching nothing.

This seems to give the darkness strength, and it surges forward and covers Stefan and Damon as one. The brothers drop like discarded toys, their eyes staring unseeing at the sky.

Elena makes a sound she didn't know she could make, and her flailing limbs still.

The last thing that Elena sees as Klaus spirits her away is Bonnie, her hands shaking, drawing the silver knife across her throat, sacrificing herself to close the doorway.

But what has been loosed upon the world cannot be so easily called back.

* * *

Klaus carries her to his car, a late-model black convertible parked on the dirt road a mile away, and Elena slumps into the passenger seat like the corpse she is. He drives fast, his movements erratic as he shifts gears. She doesn't move, doesn't even breathe, as if staying still will help her hide from the pain.

They only get about ten miles outside of Mystic Falls before the engine seizes up, cutting off with a churning sound. Klaus pulls over to the shoulder of the two-lane highway and rises fluidly to open the hood of the car. His expression is still cool, distant, but his fingers leave behind deep indents in the leather steering wheel.

Elena lifts her head to watch him, because if she can think about him she won't have to think about anything else. He leans over the engine with that assured ease around automobiles that every man on the planet seems to possess.

She is suddenly laughing hysterically, silent tears rolling down her cheeks, as she remembers that Klaus was born in a time when steam-powered trains were still centuries away from being dreamt up, when mass automobile production lines and interchangeable parts were further away from his birth than the Roman empire. How could something like that be embedded in a man's DNA?

Her laughter dies, and she wheezes for breath she no longer needs. She clutches her chest and tries not to die, right there on Klaus's expensive leather seats.

Her vampire captor sits back down in the driver's seat a few minutes later, and this time the engine starts up when he turns the ignition. He glances over at her, where her head is tilted against the window as she cries helpless, hopeless tears. He pulls back onto the highway and doesn't speak.

It might be the kindest thing he's ever done for her.

* * *

The car only makes it another hour, and this time even Klaus's magical Y chromosome can't fix it. He slams his door with enough force to make the whole frame shake and walks around to open hers.

Elena stumbles to the ground, forgetting how her legs work for a moment, and his hand clamps around her upper arm, pulling her upright to walk beside him along the highway.

It is almost full dark now, and no cars pass them, which doesn't make sense at rush hour on a weekday, even outside city limits.

"Where are we going?" she asks in a dull voice. She half-hopes he has a plan that involves killing her, though she thinks the power of her doppelganger blood dissipated when she became a vampire.

"Far away," he says grimly. There is a tightness to his face that she realizes with something like alarm is _fear_. Klaus is the boogie monster; he isn't supposed to be scared.

But he isn't anymore, is he? The darkness beyond comprehension has usurped him with terrifying ease.

Klaus speeds up to a jog, tugging her along until she gives in and runs along the empty highway with him. She doesn't turn to look around, afraid of what she'll see behind her.

She has a feeling they are like toddlers trying outrun an adult. They can run, but sooner or later, the monster they have unleashed on the world will swoop down and destroy them, just as it destroyed everyone she had left in the world.

* * *

She and Klaus make it to Ashville, almost a hundred miles from Mystic Falls, a little before dawn, and find a city that has already met its end. It looks like a bomb went off inside it, if bombs only damaged people and not buildings.

The dead lay fallen in the streets, slumped over in their cars, face-down in their houses, all wearing expressions that say they saw something terrible before they died.

Elena stumbles backward when she sees the first bodies, a family of five in an SUV, all dressed up like they were going out to dinner. The mother is twisted around to face the back seat, her arms hanging loosely, like she was trying to stretch out to touch her sons. The boys' bodies are toppled over like dominos against one side of the car.

Klaus walks past them like they're invisible.

And of course it wouldn't matter to him like it does to Elena, would it? He has killed more people than this entire town full of corpses holds.

She trails behind him like a lost kitten as he tries starting car after car, pushing dead drivers aside impatiently, yet none of the engines will so much as turn over. The phones don't work either, Elena realizes as Klaus pulls out blank-screened cell phones from the pockets of the bodies.

And how does that even make sense? Does the nameless nightmare that has been released into the world hate modern technology? Or is it a simple side effect of the magic?

There's no one for her to ask anymore. No Bonnie. No _JeremyCarolineDamonStefanMatt_. She supposes her questions will go with her to her grave.

Klaus finally gives up on finding anything that will run. He leads her west again, toward the highway and the next town.

The dead they leave to their undignified graves, rotting under the bright spring sun.

* * *

The hours fade behind Elena as she walks alongside the empty interstate, her eyes on Klaus's boots in front of her as she follows his stride step for step.

She begins to count each time her shoes hits the pavement, thinking the name of someone she knows who is dead now. _Mom. Dad. Jeremy. Jenna. Bonnie. Caroline. Matt. Tyler. John. Alaric. Isobel._

After eighty, she starts to have trouble thinking of people, so she scans her memory for more distant connections.

She recalls meeting one of her dad's cousins from California, who had come to visit them when Elena was eight. Joe was an environmentalist, and he had deplored the human race in dramatic tones over the dinner table: "Humans – we're supposed to be Earth's most intelligent species, and yet we're going to end up destroying the only planet we've got."

But it wasn't humans who destroyed the world, after all. Elena wishes that Joe were still alive to tell him that.

It was supernatural monsters; it was her friends. It was her.

* * *

In Wytheville, Klaus finally finds a car that responds to its key turning in the ignition. It's an old Chrysler Town & Country with wood paneling that probably looked homely coming off the assembly line, and he sneers at it before sitting down in the driver's seat.

The car is empty, but Elena can easily trace the scent of the humans that so recently rode in it to two high-school aged girls collapsed face down at a Starbucks patio table across the street, flies crawling over their bare forearms. She wonders what their names were.

She flinches at an unfamiliar pain and realizes Klaus is reaching across to where she has half sat down in the passenger seat, his shoulder digging into her collarbone as he pulls her door shut.

She continues to watch him as he withdraws his hand and shifts into drive, his eyes hard and unblinking on the road ahead. He swerves around dead cars and dead owners blocking the main street, and soon they are beyond the edge of the city, and nothing but trees line the highway.

As they crest a hill, Elena twists around in her seat to get her last glimpse of yet another town of corpses who will never be buried or mourned.

In the trees behind her, she catches sight of frightened eyes and pale skin. She can't say why, but she thinks it's a man, a human.

Her first thought is hope that Klaus doesn't see it. She hopes the human is able to find a safe place to hide, if there is anyplace safe left in the world. She hopes he finds someone else, so at least he won't be alone.

Disgusted with herself, Elena squeezes her eyes shut. The part of herself that she thought was killed when she watched her friends die is still in there, after all.

She still _cares_.

* * *

Half a day later, their path is blocked by a pile of cars that must have been tailgating each other, looking like they crushed against each other at high speeds. Pieces of burnt metal and scattered corpses block the two-lane highway up to the dense forest on either side of the road.

Wordlessly, Klaus climbs out of the station wagon and opens her door. She rises to her feet before he can haul her out bodily. She knows the rhythm now. Drive and walk, drive and walk, until...

Until what? When does it end?

"Why did you take me?" she asks him a few hours later as they cut through a nature park somewhere outside of Greenville. "You would have been faster without me." Her head feels thick and dull, and she can smell the bodies of half a dozen hikers beginning to rot within fifty feet of her.

It's the first time she's spoken since Klaus dragged her out of his car, on that beautiful Virginia afternoon when her friends died and her world ended, but he shows no surprise.

"And let my prized doppelganger die?" His tone is amused, but she catches the tension underlying it. "I think not."

"That line ended with me," she says, not sure why she's bothering. "I'm a vampire now, remember?"

"A bit hard to forget, love," he says, his eyes scanning the horizon as they reach the highest rise on the park's hill. What he is looking for, she can't begin to guess. "But I expect it to be reversible, one way or another."

She thinks of that horrible shape bleeding out from the doorway into their world. "Not everything is reversible."

He meets her eyes, and she knows he is thinking of it, too.

"Let us hope for both our sakes you're wrong."

* * *

On the fifth night since she unleashed hell upon the world, they both need to hunt.

Klaus, she finds out with stomach-dropping horror, knows perfectly well that there are living humans left. Perhaps he has known longer than Elena has. Yet the survivors are so scarce that he points her in the opposite direction to find her own prey.

"I am stronger and faster," he warns her, staring down at her with that intensity that he always seems to burn with. "If you run, I will find you, and you will live to regret it."

Elena slumps against the beige sofa in the suburban McMansion Klaus has commandeered for the night. "Where would I go?"

But he is already gone.

She is thirsty, but the sensation is muffled by the heavy weight of grief that presses down on every inch of her skin. She didn't have time to learn enough control to drink without killing before… _they_ died, and she's not going to risk taking another innocent person off the planet, not going to add another person to grieve for to her list.

So she draws up her knees and stares into the unlit fireplace, wishing she could summon the willpower to set herself aflame.

Klaus returns just before daybreak, and Elena can hear the stolen blood pumping in his veins.

He says nothing, but she knows he knows. The blood that her body can no longer produce on its own is fading from her system, and she can already tell that she isn't as fast or as strong as she was. How long will desiccation take for a vampire as young as she is?

She hopes oblivion comes swiftly.

* * *

The next night, Klaus tells her again to hunt, and this time he compels her when she refuses.

But he can't compel her not to throw up, on her hands and knees expelling the blood stolen from a terrified man in dirty clothes whom Elena tried so, so hard to keep alive (and, thank the god she doesn't believe in anymore, his heart was still beating when Elena staggered away, but she's not sure it was enough), her whole body constricting because every human she glimpses reminds her of Bonnie or Jeremy or Caroline or Matt or Damon or Stefan, and they are all _dead dead dead dead dead_.

Why won't Klaus just let her die with them?

She'd love an answer to that, but like pretty much everything she's ever wanted, she knows she's not going to get it.

Klaus finds her on the ground soon after and watches her wordlessly for a few minutes, his lip curling in distaste. Then he strides into the forest without a backward glance.

Elena wonders if he is leaving her for good.

As she shakily rises off the ground and drags herself to the house he has selected for the night, she is horrified to realize that she would rather have Klaus with her in this broken world than be left alone in it.

* * *

Klaus pushes open the front door a few hours later, his steps purposeful and his eyes dangerous.

Elena rises unsteadily, because she doesn't want to die on her knees. She has barely made it upright before Klaus pushes her back against the wall and lifts his wrist to her mouth.

Starving and weak, she doesn't need to be compelled to drink. She concentrates on the weight of his arm and his chest pressed against hers and closes her eyes and clutches his hand closer, her nails digging into his other arm as his blood flows over her lips.

She doesn't think about the innocent humans he murdered for this blood and just _drinks_.

Klaus finally pulls away, leaving her gasping. "Better," he says, and his eyes are dilated. They are both breathing more heavily than they need to (especially considering they are dead).

She brushes past him silently and curls up on the couch with her back to him, but they both know he has won again.

* * *

She goes three days without speaking, following him from town to town like his shadow. Her only interaction with him is in the evenings, when he lifts his wrist to her mouth after he hunts and tightens his grip on the small of her back so she can't back away from the blood.

"Do you have me cast as the villain in this macabre play?" Klaus asks her one day.

Elena shrugs. She hasn't cast him as anything, because that would require thinking, and thinking hurts because she'll always relive seeing every last person she loved dropping dead before her eyes.

His gaze is a heavy weight on her. "You might notice it was not _I_ who destroyed the world."

She gives in so he'll leave her alone. "Just because you didn't cause _this_ doesn't make you good."

"Ah, but we're arguing different points, love," he says. "'Good' changes over the centuries. There are no absolutes and never have been. Humans simply believe the delusion of morality whenever it suits them."

Elena knows he's talking just to hear himself talk, but she rises to his bait and answers him anyway. "There are some absolutes," she says. "Some things that are always wrong."

"And you think I'm one of them, I suppose," Klaus says musingly, obviously not expecting a response.

She replies anyway. "I think there's something broken inside your head," she says. "I think a psychiatrist would say you were a sociopath."

He tilts his head, and the setting sun catches the lightest strands of his hair and renders them like white hot fire to her eyes. "I haven't been human in a thousand years, love. I think perhaps the DSM doesn't apply here, wouldn't you agree?"

"I'm still the same person I was as a human," Elena counters. Is that true, though? She thinks her past self would have killed Klaus or died trying.

She has done neither.

* * *

They don't stay in the cities anymore.

The corpses rot freely now under the spring sun, emitting a foul smell that makes Elena dry heave if she gets within a hundred feet of one.

Instead, Klaus builds campfires in the woods when they can't find a house free of corpses, and Elena pulls out sleeping bags stolen from the nearest Walmart and spreads them out near the fire like she and Klaus are nature lovers on a perpetual weekend trip.

As long days fade into long weeks and nothing changes in the world they wander across, Klaus grows introspective. Tonight he sits upright and straight-backed against a tall oak, his long legs stretched out in front of him, staring into the flames. Elena watches him from her position across the campfire, her legs curled up tight against her chest on top of her sleeping bag.

"Would you believe that before all this began I was considering leaving Mystic Falls and beginning a new life, a better life, elsewhere?" For a moment she thinks he is speaking to himself, but then his eyes meet hers across the fire.

"Where?" she asks. She's in such a habit of caring about other people that the words are out of her mouth before she can think better of them.

Stupid Elena, no one's paying attention to you anymore. There's nobody left to pretend for.

"New Orleans," Klaus says distantly, as if he is seeing a memory and not her. "I helped found the city over a century ago."

"Oh," she says, fumbling her swing at the conversational volley. "I've never been there," she offers lamely.

"It is a magnificent city, in its own way." Klaus frowns, and something broken flickers across his face. "It _was_. I suppose it looks much like all the others, now."

Then the moment is past, and he shakes his head. The mocking amusement is back. "I wanted my dear sister to come with me, you know. I'm sure you would have been devastated to see the last of her."

Elena shakes her head, but her heart pricks at the memory of the girl who had tried, in the very beginning, to be her friend. She wonders if it hurts Klaus to remember his sister, if it's anything like how she feels when she thinks about Jeremy.

She pushes that thought away. Klaus doesn't feel _anything_. He couldn't do all the things he's done if he had emotions like normal people.

"I guess you forgot about the part where Rebekah killed me."

His smile has no warmth to it. "Because your friends tried to murder me, love."

" _Alaric_ was trying to kill you," she protests, not even sure why she's bothering. "We weren't. Why would we? They were all of your line. _We_ ," she corrects herself. Sometimes she forgets she's one of them, now. "We're all of your line. And your death would mean mine."

Suicide she has considered and discarded a thousand times. She has few moral absolutes anymore, but that is one. She does not care if she dies, but she will not seek it out.

"But your death would not mean mine," Klaus points out. The fire crackles, casting flickering light across his pale skin, but his eyes are still in shadow, and she cannot make out his expression.

She sits upright, abruptly angry. "So kill me," she says.

He doesn't.

* * *

The weeks become a month and more, and Elena can feel the shifting unease of the world increasing inexorably. She suspects it's because the nameless monster is still out there, polluting, infiltrating the planet.

She wonders if Klaus can feel it, too. If he does, he shows no sign of true urgency, just presses her ever onward, ever westward. He rarely finds a car that will run anymore, even if for just an hour, and they spend most of their days walking along deserted highways underneath the too-blue sunlight.

Klaus stops walking and turns to face her, one eyebrow raised. "Elena."

She realizes she has stopped in the middle of the road, trying to define the exact feel of the deep wrongness, tightening in the air like a terrible spring waiting to be released.

Klaus gives her an assessing look. "Are you hurt?" He knows she isn't; it's just the polite meaninglessness that still slips from his lips sometimes, the veneer of civility he has wielded as a tool to pass as human for years at a time.

She shakes her head, and Klaus takes her arm impatiently, pulling her along beside him. Where he touches her, she feels warm. It feels strange against the cloud of clammy sickness hanging over the world and pressing against her skin. In her bones, she knows something is coming.

She closes her eyes so she can't see the shadows closing in on her.

* * *

Jeremy is the first to come to her. He creeps in as the evening drags on, that half smile that she remembers so well flickering across his lips. "Hey, big sis," he says, leaning against the picket fence across from her.

She feels no surprise when she sees him, as if part of her was waiting for this and didn't know it.

"You're not real," she whispers.

"I'm not alive," her little brother says agreeably. "But I _am_ real."

If this is how her descent into madness begins, she will not fight it. "I _miss_ you, Jer." She has to bite down on her lip to stop her trembling from becoming sobs. "I'm sorry I couldn't save you."

Jeremy shakes his head. "That wasn't your job, 'Lena." He steps forward like he is going to hug her-

Then Klaus is standing in front of her, fresh blood flowing through his veins and an expression that looks almost troubled on his face. "Who are you talking to, Elena?"

She blinks up at him, and a bright gibbous moon illuminates him from behind. It is full dark, and the day has fled, taking her not-brother with it.

"To myself," she says. For all she knows, it's even true.

* * *

Elena trembles the entire next day, her nails digging into her palms where Klaus can't see them, counting down the minutes until she will be alone, will have a chance of seeing her brother again.

They finally stop for the day at a well-maintained campground lying in the deepening shadows of low, thick-trunked trees. Klaus departs to venture into the city alone, leaving her outside of the range of its festering rot.

Out of consideration for her or simple expedience, secure in the knowledge she won't run away?

Elena waits in silence, clenching her fists and hoping, praying, to see her brother again. She will accept the madness, embrace it, for any reminder that she had a life before the world's death, before Klaus.

Yet the hours pass, and she is still alone. She has never felt so alone in her life.

Abruptly, it all seems so unbearably stupid. Her whole existence means nothing. Maybe it has never meant anything.

Unable to sit still anymore, she rises, but she can't take more than a couple steps before she drops back against one of the sparse trees, leaning her head back until the bark scrapes against her hair. She's breathing heavily, whimpering.

 _Don't need to breathe_ , she thinks disgustedly. So stupid. She's so stupid.

Her vision swims, and she closes her eyes. Death either holds nothing or the tiniest hope of seeing her brother again. Either would be better than this, walking around with a hole in her chest.

By the time Klaus returns, her crying has mostly faded into exhausted apathy. She hears him walking toward her, feels his shoes brush against her jeans as he stops in front of her.

She opens her eyes without meaning to, staring up into his intent gaze through her tears. He has always commanded her attention, even as she hates him for it.

He is holding two tattered tomes in one hand and a black backpack in the other. It's a cheap, plastic thing, meant for holding a student's geometry textbooks.

He sets them down carefully on the campground table next to her, and she doesn't have the energy to question him. The books are magic; she doesn't need him to tell her that. Magic and spells and maybe something that can construct darker magic than she's ever dreamed of.

Klaus is still watching her. "You want to die," he says.

What's the point in denying it? He could always see through her.

He reaches out and tilts her chin to the side roughly, baring her neck. She flinches in pain but makes no attempt to move away.

"Do you wish I would kill you?"

She says nothing, and that is answer enough. Klaus leans over her, one hand pressing into the tree trunk next to her shoulder and the other holding her head still. She gasps as he presses his teeth against the crook of her neck, his mouth hot and wet.

She closes her eyes and hopes her end won't hurt too badly.

But it is not fangs she feels when he bites down on her skin, but blunt human teeth. Klaus pulls away, looking angrier than she has ever seen him. "No."

His anger kindles her own in return. He has dangled what she wants in front of her, and then denies it. She fumbles for a reason he might accept, the words to convince him she is better off dead. "I'm of no use to you."

She thinks of the spellbooks and isn't certain of that, but his denial doesn't come. Nor does his expression change.

She reaches for another answer. "You have to hunt more to feed me, too." Her voice shakes. "I don't want anyone else to die for me. Kill me, drain my blood if you need to. Just let this be over."

His hands clench, and he looks away. "I don't kill them," he says in a low voice.

"You don't kill them?" she echoes like an idiot. "The humans? Why?"

There is the tiniest pause, and if she was still human she probably wouldn't have registered it, but she knows he is going to lie to her.

"The same reason humans are careful not to kill off cows, love," he says dryly, his calm control seeming to have returned. "We're going to have a serious problem on our hands if I hunt too heavily."

It's a good reason, but it's not the only reason.

She nods, but a prick of curiosity sparks inside her. She wishes she could fight it back, but it settles upon her, just as the resentment that Klaus will not let her die, will make her walk just as he's done every day for almost two months.

"Okay," she says tiredly. Her will to fight has faded, and it seems now that that the easiest path is to follow him. As always.

Rising unsteadily to walk to her sleeping bag, she trips over a tree root. Klaus reaches for her instinctively as she stumbles, but she twists away from him, catching herself on the trunk instead.

It's bad enough to have her life centered around Klaus without having to think of his touch, too. Her skin still stings from where he bit her.

Mechanically, she unrolls her sleeping bag and sets aside a change of clothes for the next time they're in a house with a shower. She pretends she doesn't know Klaus hasn't moved.

She wonders what he is staring at.

* * *

Her mom comes to her next, climbing the steps to where Elena is sitting on a rickety, handmade front porch swing in front of the empty cabin Klaus has appropriated for the night.

Elena half-expects her to be holding a pitcher of sweet tea, but that's silly. Miranda Gilbert was a social woman, warm and bright and all about the words college admissions committees like to see: civic duty and community and leadership. She doesn't belong at this stolen summer cabin, where trite sayings like "Life is better in flip-flops" and "Home Sweet Cabin" are painted onto flat pieces of wood, and deer antlers hang over the doorway.

"Hello, sweetheart," her mother says, and Elena stops caring that she is going insane.

"Mommy." She is suddenly sobbing, big gasping breaths and her stolen blood pounding. "You're dead. Everyone I love is dead now."

Her mom's eyes crinkle sympathetically as she sits down beside her on the swing. "Oh, honey, I know. But it's not your time yet." She presses a kiss to Elena's forehead. "You've still got a part to play."

A thousand thoughts flicker across Elena's mind, fears and questions and pleas. "But-"

Then Klaus is walking up to the porch, and her mom is gone like she was never there.

Elena screams in pure rage. " _You took her from me_!"

She is flying at Klaus before she can think, and he is so shocked that she actually gets a punch in to his face.

Her heart beats a pounding fury, and it's the strongest emotion she's felt in months and months.

Klaus catches her fist in time to stop her second swing and holds both of her arms in one of his without apparent strain. She snarls at him, feeling her fangs descending and her eyes turning feral, and he twists and pins her against the wall of the cabin before she can think to kick him in the balls.

"Tell me," he says, and it's not a request.

Elena shakes her head, tears freefalling down her cheeks. She hasn't seen Jeremy again, and it's been weeks and weeks. That might have been her only chance to see her mother. Ever.

Klaus tilts her chin up, and she reluctantly meets his eyes. "Elena. Tell me what you saw." To her shock, he's not compelling her.

"My mom," she breathes.

Like that's a signal, he slowly releases her arms and steps back from her, letting her stand unhindered. "The barrier is weakening," he says, almost to himself. "But why are only you being visited?"

Still angry, she spits out, "Maybe because nobody wants to talk to _you._ "

* * *

Damon used to make fun of her for her "suicidal tendencies", and it's true that she gets herself in danger fairly often. You would think even _she_ would have learned by now not to taunt one of the world's deadliest killers, though.

For three days, she and Klaus do not speak, though he still feeds her every night, pressing her against the wall and forcing his wrist to her mouth until his blood tingles through her veins, and then pulls away roughly, something dark in his eyes.

As she curls up in the dark on the fourth night and waits for Klaus to return, she realizes that this is their version of hate sex.

When he comes back from hunting, she speaks before he can press her against the wall. Whatever he is, it doesn't make what she said right. She doesn't want to lose any more of herself.

"I was wrong," she says quietly. "I know people loved you. Rebekah did, even when she didn't want to, and Elijah, and your mother, and maybe even Caroline, a little. I didn't mean what I said. I was just so upset that my mom was gone."

He doesn't speak, but when he steps forward to press his wrist to her mouth this time he is almost gentle, and he places his other hand against the small of her back to hold her steady as she swallows down his blood.

* * *

In Mississippi, Klaus turns left off of the highway they have been following for hundreds of miles, leading them south instead of west.

"There is something for me in New Orleans," he murmurs, as if she is going to stop and demand answers. "I once knew a woman, a witch… She will be dead, but her books…"

 _You just want to see your old kingdom_ , Elena thinks, but she does not say it aloud. Not because she fears Klaus's wrath, but because reminding him of what he has lost would cause him pain.

She wonders when not causing Klaus pain became one of her priorities.

* * *

New Orleans looks worse than the other towns Elena has seen, perhaps because it is bigger than others they have stayed in, or because it is so close to the ocean. There is rot, of course, but it is not just human putrefaction, it is untended pets decaying in houses, it is rotting fish bones lying on plastic trays in the markets, it is hot humidity trapping the air and weighing it down with death and decomposition.

Elena chokes and stumbles, forgetting again that she does not have to breathe as she feels the bile rise in her throat. Klaus reaches out and grabs her by the back of her neck, and for an instant she thinks, _this is it_ , he has finally tired of her and her terribleness at being a vampire, and he is finally going to grant her death.

But instead he pulls her toward him, pushing her nose and mouth into the crook of his neck until all she can smell is the sweet, clean blood pumping in his jugular and the smoky, dark scent that is Klaus himself.

"Focus on me," he says, settling his arm around her waist so that they can continue walking with her pressed against his side.

She's pretty sure she couldn't do anything else if her life depended on it.

* * *

Her dad comes to her while she sits alone in a hotel room on Bourbon Street. His shoulders are broad, and his dark, kind eyes are already crinkling at the edges as he steps inside the room.

He sacrificed his life to save hers.

That's always the first thing Elena remembers when she thinks of him now. She trembles on the cusp of an entirely reverent feeling, though surely most parents would do the same for their kids. She wasn't even his biological daughter, and he had loved her _that much_.

Then the next second she is filled with self-loathing, disgust for how much she has ruined in the short time since her parents died.

Does he still love her? Does he wish he hadn't saved her?

"Hello, Brown Eyes." He looks at her with such undisguised fondness that for a moment there is no time, no space, just an empty universe in which she and her dead father stare at each other.

Then she is throwing herself at him and sobbing into his chest, and how can a ghost feel solid and how can he smell like the cologne he always wore, the Louis Vuiton one that Mom bought him every year for Christmas?

"Daddy," she says, and for a long time she can't say anything else.

"It's so good to see you, sweetheart," he says quietly, hugging her back just as hard.

When she can breathe again, he steps back, squeezing her upper arms and looking her in the eye seriously. "I think you know why I'm here, sweetie."

She wipes her eyes and shrugs. "'Don't give up', right?"

He grins. "Something like that. It's gonna be hard, sweetie. Really hard. But you've got to get up and get moving again. 'One foot in front of the other.' You remember, right?"

"Like the snake exhibit."

"Exactly."

When Elena was younger, she had been terrified of snakes. She had been convinced that cobras were waiting in the high grass to strike her when she walked outside and boa constrictors curled up under her bed to strangle her to death while she slept.

After yet another night waking up the whole house with a screaming nightmare, her dad had taken her to the zoo in Roanoke the next day instead of school, and they'd watched the lions stretch in the sun, fed the flamingos a handful of brown pellets for a quarter, and then he'd walked casually toward the reptile house.

When she realized were they were going, she'd panicked. "One foot in front of the other, sweetie," he had cajoled her gently, until she'd finally nodded and stepped into the building, her heart pounding.

He'd explained to her how thick the glass was, how much force someone could put on it without breaking it. Showed her all the harmless snakes that couldn't hurt her any more than a mosquito could. Showed her that her fears made normal snakes into monsters a million times scarier than they actually were.

Showed her that if she put one foot in front of the other, she could walk through a room filled with snakes the same as she walked through the halls of her elementary school.

Showed her she was _strong._

"I remember," she whispers. Her dad smiles and kisses her forehead, and then he is gone.

* * *

Dusk is fading into full night when Klaus returns, bringing the smell of parchment and ancient dust with him as he ascends the stairs. Elena has pulled a dining room chair out onto the tiny balcony framed by iron filigree and is staring over the empty stone streets of the French Quarter. She doesn't know the last time she has moved, waiting in the dark.

When has it gotten so that if Klaus is not with her she doesn't sleep? When did that start?

She rises automatically when he enters. "Did you find anything?" she asks.

He sets the books down on the dining room table and looks up at her evenly. "I thought it didn't matter to you?"

"I..." He's right; it shouldn't matter to her. It doesn't.

He smiles wryly and holds his arm out in a peremptory gesture. "Come here, I'll show you."

Like a magnet, he pulls her into his web of wishes, until his desires become her own. Dumbly, she moves to his side, and he lets his hand drop.

"Bonnie Bennett's sacrifice was not enough," he says, tapping a long, pale finger on a page of faded handwritten notes. She flinches when she hears her best friend's name on his lips, and he politely pretends not to notice.

"There is another place where the walls of reality have weakened. This is the place we must find."

"Does your plan involve sacrificing me?" The words tumble out of her mouth before she knows what she's going to say. They are words she would not have bothered to ask just a few days ago. Is that strength? She doesn't know.

Klaus's expression flickers for a moment, before his usual cool amusement returns. "No. I don't expect your death would have any impact on the spell."

She nods and turns to go – to stare out over the dead city and try to remember not to breathe – but Klaus speaks again, his voice sounding strange and uncertain. "I would not lie to you about this."

She nods and keeps walking.

She believes him.

* * *

She cries herself to sleep every night for a week.

It's stupid, pointless. There's nothing more to cry about now than there has been for the past two months, yet here she is, waking in the middle of the night with her face swollen and wet, her legs curled up under her chin as her whole frame shakes.

Yet this isn't the same grief. These are the same tears Elena shed after her parents' car accident, the tears that came from having two sources of endless love ripped from her life. Their deaths marked the end of her life of happiness, of naivety, and none of the good things that happened to her since then has ever made up for the hole they left in her heart.

Now that their ghosts are gone, it's as if her mom and dad have died and left her behind all over again.

She hears Klaus enter the living room where she is curled up on the couch, and she opens her eyes to see a strange expression cross his features. She presses her face against her pillow and waits for him to go away. Instead, he settles at the end of the couch a few inches from her feet and opens one of his heavy books.

His presence is a weight she can feel and almost touch, and his utter calmness gives her something to focus on besides her own pounding grief. She falls asleep to the sound of him turning dust-thickened pages.

He is gone when Elena wakes the following morning, and she wonders if he was attempting to be kind.

She doesn't know which possibility scares her more – that Klaus can't change, or that he can.

* * *

In El Paso, Elena follows Klaus into the city, her first time walking into a city since that awful morning in New Orleans. She doesn't know why she's doing it, but she suddenly doesn't want to be trapped inside, alone all day.

She holds her breath when the first buildings come into sight, but the city's rot has long since crested, and the stench doesn't drive her to flee anymore. There are weeds growing between cracks in the asphalt, and a stray dog growls at her before running down an alley to hide.

She wanders the streets, slipping inside used bookstores and occult shops to search for real spell books, real books on magic, just to give her something to do. She gives up when the sun is close to setting. El Paso has long since lost electricity, and she doesn't want to be alone in the darkness.

As she exits the final store and steps out onto the street again, she realizes she's not alone after all. Two women and a man are walking out from a side street, talking quietly among themselves.

They freeze when they see her, standing alone in the middle of the street. Their clothes are worn, and all three of them look thin and drawn. They are each carrying heavy backpacks like they are dedicated campers, which Elena supposes they are, now, and the man has a rifle slung across his shoulder as well.

Elena wonders what they see when they look at her. She is clean, well-fed off of Klaus, and her shirt and jeans are new, taken a week back from an unopened department store bag she found in the closet of one of the countless empty houses they have stayed in. She doesn't know the last time she felt genuine hunger.

The humans shift nervously as she stares at them, and Elena's attention focuses on the heartbeats she suddenly realizes she can hear. Their blood is pulsing in jugulars, in wrists, in femoral arteries, in hearts, calling at her with an ancient rhythm, the perfect prey to her predator.

It's been months since she was near enough a human to be tempted, and her control stretches thinly between her and the cluster of frightened humans.

She fights back the rush of desire for their living, beating blood, standing in the street and trembling with self-control. Their lips are slightly blue, she notices, their breathing more ragged than it should be from moving at a walking pace. She was right; the air isn't right for humans anymore. Too little oxygen, maybe, or too much carbon dioxide. She wonders if they know it yet.

They still haven't fled. She wants to open her mouth and tell them to run, but she's afraid any movement will break her hold on her hunger.

The man shifts again, and his heartbeat spikes higher. Without warning, without thought, she is on him, faster than he will be able to see her move. Her fangs rip into the hard muscle of his neck like it's silk, and then hot, heady blood is flowing over her tongue, down and down until she can feel it like a glow running through her tingling veins, making her whole body tighten in pleasure.

The man makes a deep groaning noise, but the pressure of his hands on her shoulders are nothing against her strength, and then she can feel him starting to buckle underneath her -

Then she is being ripped away. She stumbles backward and opens her eyes to see Klaus, holding her back easily from the wavering human with one hand on her arm.

She meets his eyes furiously, her lips still bloodied, and he raises an eyebrow. "I think you'd come to regret that, love," he says coolly, nodding at the man.

He turns back to the other humans, and Elena is certain, through her fading bloodlust, that he's going to kill them. He probably think it's a kindness to prevent her from doing it herself.

Which, she realizes with a stomach-dropping realization, it probably is.

But Klaus only stops, one at a time, and compels each of them to leave the city and forget this night. One by one, the look of horror fades from their faces, and they immediately turn and walk back the way they came.

When it is done, Klaus turns back to her, but something in her eyes makes him change what he was going to say. "Come, love, it wasn't all that terrible."

He tilts his head in the direction their house for the night is in, but she can't make her feet move. After a moment of appraising her, he takes her arm again and pulls her, not roughly, until she is walking alongside him.

"A lapse," he says after they have walked several minutes in silence. "It is nothing, Elena. Nothing happened."

Elena shakes her head numbly. She is a murderer, and it doesn't matter that Klaus stopped her. She wonders if she would have killed the other two next.

It's dusk now, and the sky is deep blue on the horizon, darkening to nearly black overhead. Elena glances at him from the corner of his eye, at the shadows that are cast along his fine, aristocratic features.

"Klaus?" she whispers. "Why don't you kill them?"

She knows he'll recognize what she's really asking - not just these three humans, but the dozens of others that he's hunted that she's never seen.

For a moment, she thinks he isn't going to answer, or that he'll toss off another wry witticism like before.

"I didn't want to see you cry," he says finally, not looking at her. "You've done enough of that for several lifetimes."

"Oh," she says quietly. He has managed to surprise her again. She thinks the flaw is in her, not him, for being so convinced that he can't.

* * *

The darkness has been growing since leaving Texas, and Elena knows they are close. The weight of the disquiet is discordant, striking unnaturally against the brokenness of the earth, and she shivers all the time now.

She can't stand to be alone anymore, so she follows Klaus on routes that only makes sense to him, from gravesite to long-abandoned church to yellow strokes carved into rock formations that must have been drawn by a long-ago indigenous tribe.

She wonders if they had a word for destroyer, for murderer. She wants to press her hand beside the carving and see the etchings reflected on her own skin.

* * *

The day she realizes Klaus is a man is the same day that he yells at her, and the same day she almost dies.

They are walking in the empty desert somewhere between Arizona and New Mexico. The sand under her feet is gray like it's been smothered in ashes, and the late summer sun they have been treading under all day is much too cool for this time of year. Elena suspects it has been that way for months.

These days her vision flickers sometimes, and something that had been ten feet ahead of her will be five, or two, feet from her, or twenty farther away. She hasn't told Klaus, but she wonders if he has experienced it, too. Maybe not. He never saw the ghosts.

When it happens this time, her next awareness is that she is falling painfully, rocks and dirt coming along with her as she skids down a steep slope that wasn't there before. Her hands clutch at the packed earth, splitting open her palms and arms, until she manages to stop her downward slide braced against something solid under her left leg and a fist-sized rock clutched in her right. The rest of her body hangs heavily over a long drop.

"Elena!" For the first time that she can remember, Klaus sounds afraid. She watches him through the dust clouding her vision as he hurries down the incline toward her, carefully keeping his balance on the downward slope so he doesn't skid over the edge and bring them both with him.

The last ten feet are the hardest; the closest he'll be able to get is on her right side. Where her left leg is braced the ground above is slick with air weathered rocks, and too steep to hold onto without crevices to grip.

She watches him wordlessly, going to so much effort to try to get to her. She has a sudden wrenching thought that maybe she is his punishment. Maybe he was supposed to have been the savior. Maybe would have been able to fix the world by now without her as his constant hindrance.

She twists her neck to look down. The ground below her is all exposed rocks, and these have not been smoothed by the wind. They're jagged and hard, and if she fell on them...

"Elena." Klaus's voice draws her attention back to him, and there is something dark and terrible in his eyes.

Her hand that is gripping the rock begins to shake with the exertion of holding up most of her body weight, and Klaus still isn't close enough to grab her arm.

She could let go. That thought trembles in her mind. Klaus would never know for sure if it had been on purpose. _She_ might never know for sure. The fall would break her body. There would be no desiccation, just an ending. Painful, but quick.

"Reach for my hand, Elena," Klaus says, and his face is paler than she's ever seen it, his lips pressing together hard before he continues, "Brace your weight on your left leg, and then jump toward me. I will catch you."

She glances at the ground again, bites her lip. She jumps.

And Klaus catches her.

In the next instant, he has moved them back on flat ground, and she is on her back, Klaus straddling her, looking angrier than she's ever seen him. His knees and thighs are so tight on either side of her hips that she can't move an inch.

"What the fuck were you thinking?" She tries to push him away, but he grabs her arms and holds them above her head, pressing them against the ground. His voice drops, and somehow that's scarier. "Do not _ever_ try a stunt like that again. You are mine."

She wonders if that's true. She closes her eyes, flinching when a gust of dry desert wind sends stinging dust into the long cuts running along her palms and down the inside of her arms.

"Are you hurt?" Klaus asks immediately, letting her arms free. Without waiting for her answer, he bites into his wrist and presses it against her lips. Suddenly exhausted, she drinks from him, though her cuts will heal soon enough on their own.

She drops her head back with a thud, opening her eyes to stare at the stars above her. Klaus still hasn't moved, and she suddenly realizes what an intimate position they're in. He's a heavy weight on her stomach, hips, and upper thighs, making no effort to leave space between them or to make sure she's comfortable - and that fact, of all things, makes her feel a spark of something she would probably think was awful if she had the energy to be horrified at anything.

But she doesn't, anymore.

As if he feels the shifting in the air, too, Klaus moves as if to rise off of her, but then he slips an arm around her back, pulling her until she's sitting half upright. She's pretty sure she's never been this close to him, face to face, and a chill runs down her spine at the intense focus in his eyes.

Gently, he gathers all of her hair at the base of her neck, slides it in skillful fingers and then tugs, pulling her head backward and to one side, exposing her neck to the night air.

It's a primal gesture, and one she recognizes in her bones despite her inexperience as a vampire. A demand for submission.

"Do not do that again," he repeats, staring her down until she drops her eyes.

"I won't," she says finally, and she means it.

Something indefinable in his eyes, he nods and slowly stands. Without a word, he turns to their backpacks to begin building a fire for the night.

Elena stays on the ground. She closes her eyes again and tries not to think about the hot coil in her belly or what it means that Klaus didn't compel her.

* * *

While she sits alone at a campground outside of Santa Fe, Damon and Stefan come to her, together in death as they were in life. Elena knows they will be the last from the moment she sees them.

"Oh, Elena," Stefan says, and his voice is filled with heartbreak and love.

"I _miss_ you," she says, her voice already choking on her tears. She turns to Damon, his bright blue eyes watching her so warily, waiting for her to ignore him in favor of his brother.

" _Both_ of you. So much."

Stefan opens his arms, and Elena doesn't hesitate. She wraps her arms around his neck, rests her head on his chest. He is firm and smells good and she loves him so, so much.

She pulls back quickly, because who knows how long they'll stay with her? She steps into Damon's arms before she's even sure he'll let her.

He does. He holds her tight and kisses her forehead softly. "Miss you more," he says. "Stefan's been mopier than usual, if you can imagine that."

Stefan rolls his eyes, reaching out to tug her wrist and pull her gently away from Damon.

"We don't have a lot of time," he says, looking at her seriously. "You know we're not supposed to be here. The gateway that Bonnie made is still open, and it's not supposed to be. There are very good reasons why the dead are supposed to stay dead."

"I know," Elena says, wiping her eyes. But she doesn't really care about solving riddles or being strong saving the world, when she can suddenly see a much more obvious solution. "Stefan, Damon…can't I just come _with_ you?"

"No!" Damon says sharply.

Stefan is more gentle. "You know why," he says.

Elena laughs bitterly. "I still have a 'part' to play. Do you know what I've been doing for the past three months? Fighting with Klaus and walking a thousand miles across the North American continent. Yeah, I must be _really_ important."

Damon smirks. "Ah, but there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio."

She rolls her eyes, shakes her head, and then realizes anew who she is talking to. Fresh tears roll down her cheeks.

"Can't you stay with me, then?" She is begging and doesn't care. "Till I have to fulfill my destiny or whatever?"

The brothers exchange glances, and Elena doesn't know which of them looks more pained. "We can't," Damon says reluctantly. "Trust me, if there was any way…"

Stefan shakes his head. "The only reason we're here now is to tell you that no matter how tempting it is, you _must_ close the gateway. I'm actually surprised we're still here."

Damon shakes his head. "It's because that was _your_ reason, brother," he says. Stefan looks over at him in surprise.

" _My_ reason," Damon continues, looking at Elena with a conspiratorial smile, "is to tell you it will all be okay."

"What?" she says, lost. She passed the realm of "okay" so long ago that the word truly does not make sense to her.

"What you're gonna do," Damon says, and then both the brothers are fading away like she's losing her cell phone reception. "It's gonna be the right thing to do, and you're gonna be okay."

Then she is alone once more.

She drops to her knees and cries for what feels like days.

They've all been wrong. Maybe she has just been hallucinating, projecting her wishful thinking. It _was_ her job to save her friends, she has no part to play, she's not strong, she can't help with what Stefan asked, and nothing is ever going to be okay again.

Klaus approaches on silent footsteps several hours later. "Another visit?" he asks softly.

She doesn't want to answer, doesn't want to do anything except curl up on the ground and die, her fucking _destiny_ be damned, but he won't go away until he gets an answer. She knows him well enough to know that.

"Yes," she whispers. She hesitates, but he should know, too. "The last."

"We are close, then," he says. When she looks up, he is staring at the stars like the answer might lie in astrology.

Close to the answers or close to the end?

She doesn't know, and she's not sure it matters, anyway.

* * *

With the ghosts gone, the nightmares begin.

They crossed the border into Arizona several days back, and they begin to find empty mansions whose inhabitants had fled the desert summer for cooler climates. These clay-colored houses with their raw wood beams overhead and exposed stone walls make her feel trapped instead of safe. Elena misses the stars.

At night she twists in unfamiliar beds, rolling the sheets in her fists without waking up, dreaming of the skeletons of her friends staring back at her with empty eye sockets.

She knows Klaus knows. He appraises her in the mornings wordlessly, watches her from the corner of his eye as she sits on the couch, her eyes seeing death as she pretends to read one of the books on the coffee table. She wonders if he is waiting for them to get better, for her to get better.

They don't, and she doesn't.

Her dad smiles at her through lips stitched together shut, his skin sewn inexpertly around his frame like a taxidermy doll, Jeremy's eyes are a pile of black ashes in empty eye sockets, and Stefan carries his own heart in his hand, a dagger still sticking in the gaping hole in his chest where he stabbed it out himself.

Elena screams, and this time her hands hit solid flesh as she flails. Klaus is leaning over her, her wrists captured in one hand. "A dream, Elena," he says quietly. "A nightmare. Nothing more."

She nods, but when he turns to go, she reaches out without thinking about it, her fingers curving around his wrist. He goes very still, glancing from her fingers to her eyes.

"Stay," she pleads in a voice hoarse from shouting. "Just for a few minutes. Please." She rarely asks him for anything, knows her wants matter little to him and he might take pleasure in doing the opposite. But this time, she asks anyway.

He looks at her for a long moment, and she releases her hold on his arm.

Wordlessly, he sits down on the bed next to her, and she moves over for him to have enough space. Tentatively, she reaches out for his arm again, waiting for him to pull it back, to yell at her, to leave the room and the cabin for her to die alone in it.

He still says nothing. She wraps her fingers tighter into his the crook of his arm and closes her eyes.

There are no nightmares, this time.

* * *

Klaus is gone when she wakes up, and she waits for a snide comment as she walks into the living room, but he barely glances at her.

He is seated at the dining table with a heavy piece of drawing paper and a pile of books, drawing diagrams in perfect imitation of those inked in the books' fragile faded pages, copying out sections from multiple spellbooks.

She glances at the couch, so much like a hundred couches she has sat on, a hundred living room walls she has faced with a blank stare, waiting silently for the hours to pass and for night to come so that she can fall asleep and do it all over again in the morning.

She pulls out a chair and sits down beside Klaus at the table.

His fingers on the pages still for the slightest moment, and then he pushes the text to her and reaches for another book. He sketches out the symbols she should be looking for in the faded script of this forgotten language. God. Death. Destruction. Ending. Eternity.

The hours pass in silence, but Elena doesn't mind. It feels strange, to intentionally move when she has done nothing but follow and obey for almost four months, but she keeps turning the pages.

If Klaus is going to bring about the world's destruction, she at least wants to be part of it.

* * *

Elena wakes up screaming.

She hadn't meant to fall asleep, and she is still slumped half-upright against the wooden headboard in her latest bedroom. She has spent the past two weeks in an exhausted haze, purposely sleeping in uncomfortable places with all the lights on so she can't fall asleep deeply enough to dream.

Because she knows what she will see when she closes her eyes - death, an eternity of death, and pain - inflicted upon the people she loves most in the world. Inflicted by _her_.

Her hands are shaking so hard she almost can't get her fingers wrapped around the doorknob to open the bedroom door.

As she steps into the hallway, she realizes the house is empty. She resents Klaus for leaving, irrationally hates him for daring to leave while she sleeps, even as she knows perfectly well he must hunt for both of them.

Her nerves race with remembered adrenaline of a thousand fears come true as she opens the door to the master bedroom Klaus has chosen for himself. He has kept it meticulously neat, even though she knows they will be leaving it behind like all the others within the week.

A leatherbound spellbook lies on one nightstand, and she opens it as she sits down on top of the sheets. She can feel her heartbeat slow. The silence isn't as crippling in here, the nightmares less tangible.

Slowly, as if she is hypnotizing herself, her fingers begin to trace the runes. She only recognizes the ones Klaus has shown her. The symbols are tight scrawled with what she imagines is desperation, written in thick strokes that must have been pure black before they spent centuries decaying. _Death destruction death death destruction_. She sees those two a lot.

She has switched to trying to guess what some of the other runes mean by their context by the time Klaus returns past midnight. He stops in the doorway and raises an eyebrow at her.

She bites her lip and lifts her chin, wondering if he will haul her bodily out.

After a moment, he turns wordlessly to the bathroom, and she hears the shower running a moment later.

She sets the book down carefully on the nightstand and slips under the covers, something inside her loosening at Klaus' return. She turns into the pillow, breathing in his scent. It makes her think of protection, of company, of not being alone. Her breathing, as always completely unnecessary, slows.

She is interrupted from her meditation by the mattress dipping as Klaus slides in beside her. She turns over on her side to see him. He smells like expensive men's soap and he's shirtless. He was shirtless when he came to wake her from her nightmare, too, she remembers. She doesn't want to think about why that matters to her, why she's thinking about it at all.

He reaches out for the bedside lamp and then they are in almost complete darkness. She closes her eyes, trying to focus on anything but his nearness, his body just six inches from hers.

"You need to drink, love," Klaus tells her in the darkness, in a completely normal tone of voice as if they have been sharing a bed every night since the world ended. But he's right; it's been several days, and she needs the energy her restless sleeping can't give her.

Without waiting for her to respond, he bites into his right wrist and wraps an arm around her shoulder, pulling her upright and against him so that she can drink from his wrist. His bare arm is tight across her shoulders, her lower back and hips pressed into his hard chest.

Elena tries not to think about the intensity of the situation, of how she wound up in this position, but even the pull of his hot blood as she feeds is more intense in the dark. She shifts backward against him, her hand resting briefly on his upper thigh for balance, when he makes the slightest movement.

He's hard.

Blood is sex and sex is blood, Damon told her once. They're all mixed up. She's not surprised that he finds it arousing. She wonders if he has felt like that every time he's fed her his blood.

Without stopping to think about it, she rests her hand firmly on his upper thigh, the tips of her fingers just grazing inside.

"Elena," Klaus says in warning, dipping his head so he can murmur the words against her neck. She shivers. "Don't start what you don't intend to finish."

She pulls away from his wrist, feeling a bolt of pleasure as she slides her tongue along his arm to lick the remaining blood off. Something in her remembered fear, her months of loneliness, her recognition that Klaus hasn't left her and won't leave her, makes her lightheaded with a desire for both comfort and control, to move instead of being moved in this surreal life.

Lifting her hips, she slides down her pajama bottoms and panties in one fluid movement, leaving her naked from the waist down. Where her back is still pressed against Klaus's chest, she can feel him go completely still. She wonders how much he can see of her in the dark.

Still not allowing herself to do anything but give in to her instincts, she leans forward, letting his arm fall behind her. In one smooth motion, she straddles him, pulls down his boxers, and sinks onto his hard length.

A sharp jolt of pleasure fills her from her core down to her toes, and she drops her head back and sighs at the feeling of him inside her, filling her completely. Klaus inhales sharply, not moving for a long moment.

Elena thinks that at long last, she's managed to surprise him.

Then his hands are wrapping around her hips, raising her effortlessly, only to slam back into her, making her forget how to think, how to breathe, for a moment.

He immediately sets the rhythm, and Elena has a moment of amusement that he insists on being the one in control, even during sex, even when she's the one on top. Then the thought is wiped away again in the sensation of him thrusting inside her, hard and deep, over and over again.

He effortlessly attunes himself to her reactions as she comes undone on top of him, slowing when her heartbeat speeds up, then bringing her closer again with steady strokes until she wants to strangle him.

"Go, go, go," she breathes in desperation as he pulls her from the brink once more.

She can picture his lazy grin beneath her perfectly. "Shall I do as ordered, my dear?"

"Yes," she pleads, and when the agonizingly slow pace of his hot length inside her doesn't change, she adds, "please."

She doesn't even feel the movement, just that suddenly she's on her back, Klaus still inside her. He reaches for her stomach and drags her tank top over her head so that she is completely naked underneath him, her breasts quivering with every thrust.

He reaches out to palm one breast in firm but gentle movements, and she hisses in pleasure. The feeling of pleasure, of Klaus being the one to give it to her, is shocking enough that she shuts out the thought, instead sliding her hand along the hard planes of his chest.

"Tell me how it feels, love," he says, leaning over to bite her ear and then whisper hot words against it. He sounds barely winded.

"Good," she gasps as he teases her nipple. "Alive." She hadn't meant to say that last part, but Klaus doesn't pause.

"That you are," he agrees, licking a trail along the line of her neck. Her legs tremble, and he mercifully speeds up, making it impossible for her to do anything but gasp and try to remember she doesn't need to breathe and doing it anyway.

The electric pleasure is building in her core, making her already tight muscles quiver with the mounting pleasure coiled up inside them, and she is moaning wordlessly to the ceiling, and then Klaus's hand is there, sliding smoothly down her stomach until his deft fingers are stroking exactly where she wants to be stroked. Then there is white light and hot, glowing release.

She is vaguely aware of Klaus speeding up his rhythm, and then a long, slow exhale as his movements slow and he collapses beside her. Through her white haze, she feels him shift as he lies back on a pillow.

Without thinking about it, she curls into his arm and chest, the habit of cuddling after sex so ingrained that she isn't aware that she is doing it until she's already pressed up against him.

After a long, frozen moment where Elena thinks he is going to push her away, he silently reaches for the sheets where they have kicked them to the base of the bed and pulls them over both of them.

She falls asleep against his arm, and there are no nightmares.

* * *

The next day Klaus meets her eyes without any apparent emotion, but when she pads into the kitchen to examine the creased map of the southwestern states he has laid out on the countertop, he idly traces her hip through her pajama shorts.

As she reaches past him to flatten a curling corner of the map, her vision flickers, and she staggers backward. For a horrific moment she can see only blackness, sweeping blackness that is sending her a message she doesn't want to hear.

Her vision and her awareness return slowly.

Klaus's whole arm is wrapped around her waist now, holding her upright. He watches her wordlessly as she blinks and focuses on him, and she knows he is waiting for her to explain.

"Almost," she whispers through dry lips.

She wants to say more, but she can't get the words out, and Klaus doesn't seem to need further clarification.

He helps her onto the barstool with gentle hands, but when he returns to examining his map and notebook sketches it is with movements that aren't quite so controlled as they were a few minutes before.

It's almost here, and she doesn't even know what _it_ is.

She only knows that them meeting it in time is the world's only hope.

* * *

As cliché as it is, the gateway turns out to be in a cemetery. In a long-abandoned cemetery in a ghost town near eastern California's Death Valley, to be exact, so the whole thing is almost funny to Elena on several levels.

Klaus slows their already dying SUV to a crawl as they turn off the gravel road and onto a long-overgrown dirt path, and Elena knows he feels it, too.

There is something waiting for them here, between gaping wood planks and broken window frames, calling them to come closer. Elena feels it pulling at her skin like a vacuum tugging at loose threads caught in the carpet.

Dread overtakes her, and she is suddenly hyperventilating on oxygen she shouldn't need anymore, but old habits die hard and she is so, so scared that her teeth chatter. She draws her legs up on the dashboard and buries her face in her knees.

Klaus reaches over and tangles a hand in her hair. "It will all be over soon," he says, and there is a trace of tension in his voice, too. "One way or another."

She thinks he means to be reassuring.

He isn't.

* * *

When the ground gets too rough to drive on, they continue on foot. Klaus begins chanting words in a language she doesn't recognize, and Elena feels the finality building in the air around them. She suddenly knows that they have been spared to be present for this moment, the moment they walk to their deaths.

A thick gray fog swirls up from nothing and blankets the ground for as far as she can see, tendrils snaking low over the ground and swirling around her and Klaus like dead flames.

She walks in step with Klaus toward the center of the mass, toward their ending, and she thinks it's the first time that's happened. Before, he has always led, always forged ahead and demanded she follow. Now his steps are slower, and his shoulder brushes against hers.

The wooden fence that once enclosed the graveyard has almost completely decayed back into the ground, and there is no visible difference in the dead grass on this side of the fence and the other.

But Elena can feel the moment they are no longer completely in California, the moment they are no longer completely on Earth.

Between one step and the next, the black becomes overwhelming, and it is no longer black like the night but black like no other color has ever existed.

Black like death must feel like.

An instant later, they are no longer alone in the void. A presence bigger than her and Klaus, bigger than life or death or magic or anything else she's ever known, fills up the space, seeps into her lungs and her soul.

YOU SEEK US. WHY?

Elena can feel Klaus's fingers twitch where they graze her arm. "Because the gateway must be closed."

YOU HAVE BROUGHT THIS DOWN UPON YOUR WORLD. The voice is disapproving. IT IS NOT OUR PROVINCE TO SAVE YOU FROM YOURSELVES.

"You seek order," Klaus says, and Elena is impressed that his voice only shakes slightly at addressing a god. "This would be to your benefit, as well."

There is a pause that could hold a millisecond or a millennium.

A second voice speaks, a second presence filling the void.

SO BE IT.

A blinding light surrounds them, and Elena staggers backward, Klaus stumbling alongside her. Then there is a rushing sensation, as if a giant is siphoning water out of a crater, and reality shifts back into place.

IT IS DONE, the second voice says.

BUT NEVER AGAIN, warns the first.

Its presence drops away, but Elena knows the second being is still here.

Suddenly she is falling, through time and space and the universe and beyond until it all centers around this being, and then she _sees_ it, an unnatural flowing creature – a _god_ – that is death and life and eternity all wrapped up in one unfathomable package.

She is standing in an empty, colorless space, like the desert without the dry heat and yellow sands or Antarctica without the white above and ice below. She is not a body and cannot move, only observe the being in front of her.

"Elena Gilbert," it says, and this time its voice reverberates inside her. "You have lost everyone you ever loved." It is making an observation, not offering sympathy.

"Yes," she gasps.

"You wish to ask me to bring them back to you."

She had never dreamed she would get this opportunity; she'd never even dared _think_ it. The faintest spark of hope jumps inside her, and she ignores Stefan's words.

" _Yes_."

"Tell me, what would you offer me if I granted you this boon?"

She doesn't hesitate. "Anything. Everything."

"That is why I will not give you what you seek."

"No!" The horror drops on her like ice water. "Please. I'll do anything. Kill me. Torture me. But bring them _back_."

She is sobbing by the end, imagining herself a body and falling to her knees and ignoring what all her instincts tell her and reaching out to _touch_ the god.

"I will not."

All her months of emotional deadness, of pulling away from reality, suddenly fall away like a trapdoor beneath her, and she is left drowning in her misery. A part of her she didn't realize existed was hoping that Klaus would find a way to undo what she wrought upon the world.

Now she has met the one being that can do that, and it will not.

And she knows deep in her soul that there is nothing she can do to change its mind.

"Then kill me," she says brokenly.

"Nor will I do that."

She is left with nothing, only a whispered "Why?" spoken with no expectation of an answer.

It gives an irritated little twitch. "As well a flea could understand the intricacies of its host's cellular structure as you could comprehend the deeper workings of this universe. Let it be enough that there are reasons for everything, even this."

"What humans are left are dying," she says, still uncomprehending. "In a year or two they will all be dead. What reason – what _purpose_ – could there be in me wandering the earth until I desiccate?"

"The human species will die," the being agrees. "Without aid."

A newfound sense of hope flickers within her, and she realizes part of her _does_ care, has never _stopped_ caring about the few humans who are still stumbling around. "You'll help them, then. This isn't the end."

Its horrible face looms over her, grinning like she's said something funny.

"This is not the end of humankind, no." She feels it come closer, peering at her like it can see through her skin to her soul.

"Nor is it how _you_ end, Elena Gilbert, Petrova doppelganger, newborn vampire, and protector of the human race."

* * *

Before her brain can process any thought, before she can step away or try to breathe or deny the god's words, she is being pushed out again, like a mosquito trying to break the surface tension on a lake. The pressure mounts until something fundamental to the universe, something she doesn't possess enough brain cells to comprehend, gives way, and she is forced back into her reality.

Then the fog surrounds her, and she has legs and a body again and she feels too tight underneath her skin, like a puzzle piece that's been slightly warped and doesn't fit perfectly against the other pieces anymore.

Elena takes a deep, unsteady breath in the sharp night air and tries to calm herself. But how could anyone be calm after encountering something like that? She has spoken to a god. She has been given a destiny.

And she has to figure out how to go forward again.

Klaus stumbles out next to her, and she can't see his face until he is only feet away from her. She is so relieved to see him that she rushes toward him, though she is already flinching away as she reaches out to touch him, knowing that he will not want her to touch him, will not want to show weakness.

To her shock, Klaus slides his hands through her hair and draws her face up against his.

"One thousand years, Elena," he says, staring into her eyes. There is a note in his voice she never thought she would hear: awe. "One thousand years of aiding those I have killed, of righting what I have wronged, and I will be taken home."

There is something beautiful, something human and vulnerable and _good_ in his expression.

She drops her final guard against him, and for the first time over four months, she smiles, a pure feeling of joy at being with _him_ and being _alive_ filling her _,_ and his eyes drop to her lips, his small echoing smile one of wonder.

Then he is kissing her, one hand tightening in her hair while his other draws her up against him roughly, pulling her tight against his hips. Her gasp of surprise is swallowed in his open-mouthed kiss, and she releases the lingering grasp she has had on her pain as she wraps her hand around his neck to pull him closer.

Klaus lowers his mouth to the crook of her neck and he hasn't bitten her since before the world broke and she has never, ever wanted anything this badly. As his teeth sink into her she hooks her legs around his waist and presses him tight against her, hot and hard sliding against hot and wet.

He pulls away, his lips wet with her blood, and presses her against an old oak tree that branches over much of the cemetery, its trunk speckled with the yellow and black bruises that indicate that something is very wrong with the world.

And it's still true that Elena doesn't know how to save the planet, how to save what's left of humankind from the horrors she has wrought upon it.

Yet.

She doesn't know how _yet_ , but she will figure it out.

* * *

Elena holds no fear of life nor death anymore.

She lives because her existence serves a purpose, which is all she has ever desired. ("Protect and serve," Klaus calls their task ironically, but she has never been better suited for any other responsibility.)

And when she dies, as will all creatures, natural or supernatural, someday, her body will return to the earth, and her soul will rejoin everyone she has ever loved.

That is enough.

* * *

 _Thank you for reading! Please let me know what you thought._


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